College memory: the birthday shower

Like many other decent people at my college, I was a proud member of Kirby House.

Kirby House was a men's living group that served as an alternative to the Greek system, occupying a residence hall that had been endowed in the name of Allan Price Kirby. There were no demeaning pledge activities, no silly rituals or prentensions about our importance and secrets, and not nearly as much philistine behavior.

We did, however, have the shower.

The shower was many things in Kirby House. It was a place to get clean, obviously; less obviously, it offered more privacy in our bathrooms than the toilet stalls did. Legend has it that when the Kirby family endowed the building, they insisted that "real men" didn't need doors on the stalls. That stipulation remained in effect at least as late as 1992, when I graduated, more than two decades after the college admitted its first women.

I don't think I've ever had the chance to express to the Kirby family how much I appreciated the experience of doing my business only to have the door open while people of each sex walked past in the hallway. So thank you. Thank you all.

Anyway, the shower.

In addition to keeping us clean and offering us privacy, the shower did allow us some college-age shenanigans. We often used it for celebrations. Whenever it was someone's birthday, we would celebrate by dragging that person, fully clothed, to the shower and throwing them in once we had turned it on. We also used it to welcome new members once they had accepted our invitation to join. For at least one semester, we also threw the rush chairman in every time we got a new member. (For some reason, this did not deter Gabe's enthusiasm for recruiting new members, though I recall seeing him grab a chair to hold people back at dinner one evening after the third new member had joined that day.)

We also used the shower as a form of house discipline. When someone acted in a way enough of the rest of us found annoying, we would suddenly declare it that person's birthday, and off they would go.

This happened to a number of people, but I chiefly remember it happening one night after dinner to Ted Morris. Ted, in the way that he would do, had decided to to treat "The Rose" as though it were a dramatic monologue. He was halfway through declaiming the second verse, when David McCandless said, "Isn't it your birthday?"

It was a spontaneous signal. Ted had been sitting at the table by himself. Now, without warning, there were a half-dozen Kirbs standing all around him. In less time that it takes to tell, Ted was borne out the dining room doors, down the hall, and into the bathroom, where the shower was waiting. Fortunately for everyone, the toilet stalls were unoccupied at the time.

Ted later complained that the shower treatment had been unfair and unappreciated, but I don't think anyone felt the least remorseful over it. I know I still don't, and it's been 26 years.


Addendum: As I recall, I was thrown into the shower exactly twice during college. Once was a spur-of-the-moment action by my roommate and a mutual friend, who snatched me off my feet during happy hour before dinner and threw me in. I recall the other time with great fondness, though I doubt anyone else involved felt so.

You see, Bill Dowling and a few others had noticed that while I often wished other people an impromptu happy birthday, I was never on the receiving end of such wishes. Bill was correct, and I knew it. So when he and his cohorts came to pick me up, I didn't fight. I went limp. They dragged me to the shower, complaining the whole way that I was taking the fun out of it. (Duh.) When they reached the bathroom and put me down for a moment, I stood up, walked into stall and turned the water on myself.

The posse groaned and walked away, disappointed at how un-fun the experience had been, and they never tried again.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Exx Man: a rediscovered masterpiece

I found an odd corner of my personal history on the Internet today — a sordid little chapter of my college experience called "Exx Man."

I shouldn't say I "found" it, since that makes it sound like I just happened to discover it purely by accident. The truth is that I went looking for it deliberately, because it suddenly occurred to me this morning that I had posted the entire thing to a Usenet newsgroup, a sort of predecessor to today's forums, in 1992 or so.

"Exx Man" was the high point of a collaborative story board on Lafayette's computer system. Begun my senior year, Exx Man was the sole story my senior year, after three separate stories competed for readership and participation during the second half of my junior year. It was also the most successful story, judging by audience participation and number of installments, ending with more than 100 parts and probably close to a dozen contributors.

It began simply enough as a superhero story, with the first part written by a fellow student named Frank Puskas. That held true for roughly one installment, Frank's own, before readers discovered that Exx Man actually was an inmate in an asylum and merely believed that he was a superhero. In the second part, where we made this discovery, David McCandless began the story's steady ascent into farce with the introduction of the supervillain Dragon Poker, named after a poker game played in the "Myth" series of fantasy novels.

And so it went. Before long, we discovered that Exx Man actually wasn't even a man — she was a woman who merely thought she was a man. When she made that discovery, her superhero days ended, and she became a hairdresser.

Around this time, Frank noticed that we had been messing about with his story, and he attempted to bring it all back into line by introducing a character named Dr. Dingle. Dingle was a mad scientist, experimenting on Exx Man and who was about to give him superpowers. All this stuff about being a hairdresser was just a delusion.

Frank stopped just short of that, though, leaving me a window to step in and reveal that the Dingle scene was merely a flashback, and that it was Dingle who accidentally had changed Exx Man into a woman.

For the next several weeks, Frank and I got into a minor power struggle over Dr. Dingle and his role in Exx Man's life. Frank brought him back in and tried to reassert his vision for the story, prompting me to turn Dingle into a squirrel, run him over with a truck, and serve him as the entrée on the college meal plan.

Frank then revealed that Dingle hadn't actually been so much killed as much as just stunned. I had him shot to pieces by a rowdy bunch of exterminators. I later was forced to annihilate Dingle when Frank had him cloned from a surviving tail fragment, but by that time, it had become so much killing Dingle off in new ways that I started bringing him back to life myself.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, we made fun of one another; offered extended commentary on college life; and shamelessly cribbed from M*A*S*H, Tom Stoppard, the "Terminator" movies, "Speed Racer" and other bits of pop culture; and just generally had a blast.

The story, I now realize, was more popular with the student body than I realized at the time. There were four of us who regularly contributed to it, but a surprising number of people offered one- or two-time additions, and I got feedback from other people who never contributed to it about what a riot it was. (As well as the standard, expected criticism from friends who wanted me to know how useless it really was.)

More than 12 years later, I'm amazed how many elements of "Exx Man" have stayed with me. Dr. Dingle and Markle City (named after Markle Hall, the administration building at Lafayette College) each carried over into the "Chicken Soup for the Soulless" writing McCandless and I have done for our Brothers Grinn project, currently on hiatus.

Other bits, like casting Spridle from Speed Racer as an evil genius on the level of Richard III, have stayed with me as a private sort of joke. Other characters — particularly the triad of Drake, Quince and Elwood — have shown up in one form or another in various bits of fiction I've written.

The other stories never fared as well. The day Paul Galvin launched the story board in 1990, another student and I posted story openers so close together that neither of us knew the other was doing it. The one I began was a Star Trek story, set aboard the U.S.S. James Kirk in the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It made it about seven parts before dying with no ending, but can still be found here and there on the Internet as "The Cardassian Confrontation," often linked with "Deep Space 9," although the story was written months before DS9 debuted.

The story Ron Dauphin began was a murder mystery set around a bumbling detective named Drake. Drake's story was pushed to a hasty wrap-up, after a dozen parts at most, and although it had funny moments — most notably when Drake killed the main character from a third, wholly unremarkable story someone had tried to start on the board — it never went anywhere either. To the best of my knowledge, the Drake stories don't exist anywhere anymore.

The year after I graduated, there was a meager attempt to start a new story based on the second-season Star Trek: TNG episode called "The Royale." It was later co-opted into a time-traveling secret agent story with overtures of Robin Hood and Star Wars, but it died pretty quickly itself.

Exx Man outdid them all. It made it to more than 100 posts, had no competitors for attention while it ran, and actually absorbed previous stories from the story board, like Detective Drake, who finally came into his own when he was partnered with two special agents from the FBI who came to Markle City to investigate the bizarre chaos that had followed Exx Man around since his (or her) arrival.

As actual literature goes, the Exx Man story is awful, it's meretricious, and it deserves no place on the Internet. Still, it was a lot of fun to write, it remains the best example I've ever seen of what a collaborative story can be, and even if it is all those things I said — I still like it.

You'd be crazy to read it.

Remembering the Evil Christian Fellowship

Of all the group affiliations I had in college, one of my favorites remains the Evil Christian Fellowship.

More disgruntled than actually evil, we were a group of believers who didn't fit in with the local InterVarsity chapter. Some of it was that we weren't on board with the doctrine. Some of it reflected a different view of authority, or a different web of relationships. A big chunk was that we just didn't fit in, and created a semi-clandestine identity for ourselves, even as we remained actively involved in the larger official group.

Jenny wanted to be a part of the team. She envied the chip we had on our shoulders, and had her own problems with the InterVarsity chapter. So one day while she was talking with Dave Block and me, she mentioned the Evil Christian Fellowship in the first person.

Block just stared at her a moment, and then he handed down the ultimate rejection.

"I'm sorry, Jenny, but you're just not evil enough."